Prepositional usage in spatial constructions in the Slavic languages is frequently unpredictable and perplexing to the non-native speaker. This is especially true in the case of the preposition na. By examining categories of spatial phenomena with which the preposition na is used, it is possible to better understand why na is used in many circumstances. This not only has implications for language pedagogy, but promises to aid the understanding of certain aspects of diachronic change in the semantics of the prepositional systems of the Slavic languages.

Discussion of nominalization (NZN) is possible only within a general theory of grammatical categories and processes. For a cross-linguistic analysis, it is preferable to adopt a function-based definition of categories, in which nominals are considered arguments of predications and verbals as predications. In such a view, nouns are lexical items specialized for nominal usage. NZNs may be divided into four types: Act(ion), Participant, Adverbial, and Expression. Participant NZNs are a superset of Argument NZNs, while Expression NZNs are hypostases. Nominalization processes may be considered in terms of formation strategies and differentiation strategies. Formation of NZNs may be accomplished by a number of methods. An overt marker may be used (direct encoding strategy), or the mechanisms used for forming complex modifiers may be used with generic heads to form 'names for things' (modification strategy). Transfer nominalization may be considered an additional strategy, although transfer in the framework used represents occurrence of a dual-class form and is not strictly nominalization. Differentiation of NZNs may also be accomplished via direct encoding. However, a number of other differentiation strategies exist, including the use of voice and aspect markers and noun classifiers. Typically, Participant NZNs in a given language will represent conflations of participant roles kept separate in main clause morphosyntax; these conflations follow identifiable trends. In a study of 58 languages, it was found that Instrumental NZNs significantly correlate with Agentives, and Factives with Act (ion) NZNs. The Agentive/Instrumental and Act(ion)/Factive groupings remain separate from each other. Comparison of languages in the sample also shows that certain marking categories, such as voice, appear to be related to nominalization in general. That is, transitivity downshifters are associated with nominalization while upshifters are not. The factors underlying this association are related to those involved in the formation of object concepts in child language. The nominal concept develops from the object concept, and inherits a number of prototype characteristics from it without being, in adult language, directly isomorphic to it. This relationship accounts for a number of the observed characteristics of nominalizations.

Despite the foundational role of Indo-European studies in historical-comparative linguistics, there are many persistent problems in the reconstruction of IE stops. Unresolved issues include: (1) the number of velar series to be posited for Proto-Indo-European; (2) unexplained variation between voiced non-aspirates and voiced aspirates; (3) irregular correspondences involving /d/ and /l/; (4) the typological naturalness of the reconstructed stop system. A three-way velar distinction is required for PIE, at least in some phonological environments. Albanian maintains the three-way distinction, while satem languages provide evidence for morphophonemic alternation among three series. However, pre-IE likely had only a two-way distinction, with subphonemic variation between palatalized and non-palatalized allophones of plain velars. This distinction became phonemic by secondary split at the PIE stage. Many hitherto unexplained examples of variation between *g/*g/*d vs. *gh/*gh/*dh, respectively, result from regular change of voiced non-aspirates plus the a-coloring laryngeal to voiced aspirates. This early change, which probably happened independently in Sanskrit, Greek, and Germanic, is in accord with the reconstruction of the a-coloring laryngeal as a voiceless fricative. However, not all problematic examples of voiced aspirate vs. voiced non-aspirate can be accounted for by this hypothesis. Some are due to a sporadic process of post-nasal deaspiration in pre-Greek, while others remain unexplained. Irregular correspondences involving /d/ and /l/ provide evidence for the reconstruction of a rare PIE cluster *dl. This cluster was phonotactically disfavored and was therefore subject to sporadic modification throughout the IE language family. The traditional reconstructed stop system of PIE has been criticized as being unnatural in synchronic typological terms. The so-called glottalic reconstruction is more typologically natural. However, the glottalic system is not well-suited to account for the historical developments from PIE to its attested daughter languages. For PIE, the traditional reconstruction is to be preferred on the basis of historical and comparative evidence, although the pre-IE system may have been glottalic.

This thesis is a conceptual description of Chinese substantives. The method used here is based on the analogical approach, proposed by Sydney Lamb for language description and language processing. According to the analogical approach, syntax is considered to be an epiphenomenon rather than a reality in the cognitive linguistic system of humans. All traditionally identified syntactic functions may be implemented by an analogical procedure using conceptual frames. In this thesis, all conceptual descriptions are formulated in dictionary-like entries, that may be used easily either by human being or by a computer. Each such entry is constructed as a tabular frame corresponding to a portion of a network of relationship.

The focus of this paper is on coordinate conjunction markers in Korean. Most studies of clause conjunctions in Korean have been very formal syntactic studies. Formal syntactic approaches, however, fail to identify the subtle semantic qualities of conjunctions in discourse. This paper thus adopts a pragmatic/functional perspective, concluding that coordinating conjunctions carry not only grammatical information, but also necessarily semantic and pragmatic information. In other words, the present study discovers the underlying semantic differences among the coordinate conjunctions by examining their more overt syntactic behaviors based on insights from a functional approach. This study also investigates how spoken discourse is connected. A sentence outside of its context can be interpreted in a number of different ways depending on the inclination of the interpreter. Studies 'beyond the sentence' that is actual discourse, however, ultimately necessary for understanding language. In discourse, connectivity is one of the fundamental areas needing exploration, and my analysis of spoken Korean discourse is intended as a contribution to that study. The Korean discourse data itself is another contribution to the analysis of Korean discourse.

This dissertation proposes a Construction Grammar account of how the meaning of complex constructions, specifically, analytic causatives, emerges from an aggregation of simpler constructions, which individually have fairly abstract semantics, but which in combination encode very specific event types. The constructions investigated are make s.o. V, have s.o. V, have s.o. Ving, get s.o. to V, force s.o. to V, set s.o. ( to) Ving, drive s.o. to V, move s.o. to V, lead s.o. to V, bring self to V, send s.o. Ving, give s.o. to understand, and leave s.o. Ving. Three causation event types are posited that are relevant to an analysis of analytic causative constructions: the MANIPULATE type, where an animate causer intentionally acts on a causee in a way that influences the causee such that he or she performs some activity; the TRIGGER type, where an event occurs which influences a causee such that, given the nature of the causee, the causee will inevitably undergo some process; and the PROMPT type, where an event occurs and a causee perceives this event and decides to react by performing some activity. Any given analytic causative encodes a more specific version of one or more of these event types. The two simple constructions that contribute most to a given analytic causative are causation verbs (make, have, get , etc.) and sentential complements (the bare infinitive, the to-infinitive, the present participle, etc.). Which event type(s) can be encoded by a given analytic causative does not depend on the causation verb or the sentential complement alone. Instead, particular combinations of the two yield meanings that are either compatible or incompatible with a given event type. Also discussed in the dissertation are the passivization of matrix or embedded clauses in analytic causatives, the relationship between causation verbs and their lexical sources, and the relationship between analytic causatives and transitive constructions with change-of-state or motion verbs.

Yaitepec Chatino is an Otomanguean language of the Zapotecan family, spoken in the highlands of southeastern Oaxaca, Mexico. It has been described in a small number of articles and in one full-length work, K. Pride's 1965 Chatino Syntax. Among the interesting features of the language are its large inventory of tones, which distinguish between lexical items and also have morphological functions. Morphologically, Chatino features aspectual verbal prefixes and a few derivational patterns. Incorporation of nouns and prepositions and various compounding patterns play important roles in word-formation. The basic word order is VSO, but the alternative orders SVO and OVS are also frequent, and are found to have specific semantic and pragmatic motivations. Human objects are optionally marked by the preposition 7in 'to.' The presence or absence of 7in 'to' marking the possessor codes the contrast between alienable and inalienable possession. Recipients in events of transfer are also optionally marked by 7in , depending on the type of object transferred. There are a number of constructions that result in complex sentences, including relative clauses, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, and conjunction. Description and analysis of these and other aspects of the Chatino language is based on data gathered through elicitation and recordings of oral texts.* *This dissertation includes a CD that is compound (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following applications: Windows 98/2000; Windows Media Player; Microsoft Paint; Microsoft Office.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between word-internal structure of verbal compounds and the grammatical properties of the compounds, focusing on their transitivity. Adopting a functional point of view, it provides a syntactic as well as semantic account of the seemingly chaotic syntactic features that verbal Chinese compounds possess. By being able to predict the grammatical properties of newly created compounds, the findings of the present work can be used to help students of Chinese as a foreign language have a better grasp of the language, especially the compounding patterns. The results can also be applied in computational applications, such as natural language understanding and processing. In Natural Language Processing (NLP), information about the formation and syntactic behavior of compounds is necessary for a system to be able to understand and/or translate any sentence containing newly created compounds. The method of investigation is that of general functional linguistics guided by cognitive considerations, and the study is mainly data-driven. In this work, compoundhood in Chinese is considered to reside in a continuum, i.e. there is no clear-cut boundary between words and phrases. The properties, including transitivity where it is relevant, of the five types of Chinese verbal compounds---Verb-Resultative, Verb-Noun, Verb-Verb coordinate, Subject-Predicate, and Modifier-Verb---are explored and characterized, along with means of distinguishing the five types of compounds and the subtypes with similar formal appearances. The transitivity of Verb-Resultative compounds, a highly productive type, is explored in the most depth.

Trumai is a genetic isolate language spoken in Brazil. This grammar describes the main aspects of Trumai, with hopes of contributing to typological studies. In describing and analyzing the linguistic data, I begin with synchrony, but I sometimes utilize internal reconstruction to help understand certain grammatical patterns. Trumai is basically an isolating language. There are few inflectional morphemes and words usually consist of a single morpheme. There are four open classes in Trumai: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Nouns and verbs clearly constitute two different classes; adjectives share some characteristics with nouns and verbs, but constitute a class on their own. The distinction between alienably and inalienably possessed nouns is manifested in several constructions, as is the distinction between humans, animates, and inanimates. As expected, the transitive verb phrase in Trumai contains the O and the V; surprisingly, the intransitive verb phrase contains the S, meaning that the Trumai VP is Absolutive-V. There are four verbs types in the language: Intransitive, Extended Intransitive, Transitive, and Extended Transitive. There are also auxiliaries, which can be subdivided in two sets: Aspect-Mood and Spatial-orientation (with the further subdivision of Body Posture and Directional auxiliaries). Trumai has rich syntax, although word order can change because of pragmatic factors. The case-system shows an Ergative-Absolutive alignment. With regard to grammatical relations, the traditional relations of 'Subject', 'Object', and 'Indirect Object' do not play a central role in Trumai grammar. The case-marking system and the syntax of the language consistently identify three argument types: Absolutive, Ergative, and Dative; each type contains a subset of the traditional relations. Other interesting facts observed in Trumai: (i) when a Transitive verb is causativized, both the causer and the causee are marked as Ergative; (ii) the main strategy for voice manipulation is argument suppression; (iii) there is a construction that could be classified as an instance of "possessor ascension"; (iv) the verb of a complement clause behaves as an inalienably possessed noun (more specifically, as a body part term); (v) there are multiple types of negative clauses in Trumai.

The Bungku-Tolaki group of languages (Austronesian, Western Malayo-Polynesian) comprises fifteen languages spoken in and around the southeastern peninsula of Sulawesi Island in present-day Indonesia. Although there exist no written records for these languages prior to 1900, I apply the traditional methods of historical and comparative linguistics, as well as bring to bear more recent understandings regarding the nature of grammatical and semantic change, in order to develop a picture of their common ancestor language, Proto-Bungku-Tolaki. The dissertation has two parts. In part one, I reconstruct the sound system of Proto-Bungku-Tolaki, detailing both the innovations which distinguish it from its nearest identified ancestor, Proto-Malayo-Polynesian, along with the phonological changes which occurred in the various daughter languages, bringing us up to the present day. In the second part I focus on issues of transitivity including the grammaticalization of the preposition taken as a valence-changing applicative suffix, clause structure including relative clauses, and verbal inflection. Herein, Proto-Bungku-Tolaki is reconstructed as having three construction types which allowed the expression of both an agent and a patent, namely the active, the passive, and the antipassive. Nominative and absolutive pronoun sets served as agreement markers, though the genitive subject marking original to subordinate temporal adverbial clauses has in some languages also made its way into main clauses. Because there is not as yet a significant body of published material on the Bungku-Tolaki languages, I have made a conscious effort to amply supply this dissertation with the primary data upon which my analyses have been based. Therefore although the present work is of particular relevance to Austronesianists working in the field of historical reconstruction, the data and descriptions alone should make this an invaluable reference for anyone interested in the languages of this small corner of the world. Appendices include five texts with interlinear glossing and free translation, and a compilation of Proto-Bungku-Tolaki lexical reconstructions with supporting evidence.